Reshaping Retail: Why Technology is Transforming the Industry and How to Win in the New Consumer Driven World

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Retailing

Co-authored with James Naylor

Today's senior retailers have endured a series of profound shocks and changes. During their careers, they have witnessed the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, been swept along by a credit-fueled consumer boom, felt the pressure of financial markets' expectations of cross-border retailing, and been blasted by the macroeconomic consequences of a capital market crash and its aftermath. Those who struggle for economic survival day by day and week by week may feel they have had enough history already. Nevertheless, although these words may be of little comfort, the events have been merely the birth pains of a new era in retailing in which the retail landscape will change completely.

To understand this assertion, it helps to consider the nature of today's changes in the context of the history of retailing. We can organize our thinking by dividing the time line of retailing into three eras: the mercantile, the modern, and the digital. The era of medieval mercantilism was born of an embryonic banking system that made capital funding available for the first time and steadily increased the scale and scope of trade over centuries. The modern era, from the Industrial Revolution to the turn of the 21st century, ushered in mass production and the consumer society. In the present era, which got under way 15 or so years ago, another revolution is taking place: the conventional ways of retailing laid down and consolidated over ...